Richard III Bones?

DNA samples from Canadian-born Michael Ibsen - described Wednesday as the "17th great grand-nephew of Richard III" - will now become central to an effort by British and Canadian archeologists to confirm that bones unearthed this week in the English city of Leicester are the long-lost remains of the 15th-century monarch, killed in the 1485 Battle of Bosworth Field.

The "momentous discovery," detailed at a news conference on Wednesday after a skeleton with "circumstantial evidence consistent with battle wounds" was dug up from under a Leicester parking lot, moves the project to identify King Richard's remains to a DNA laboratory headed by Canadian scientist Turi King, a Vancouver-born University of Leicester geneticist.

Remarkably, the skeleton - exhumed from a 15th-century church compound and 17th-century garden long thought to be associated with Richard's burial site - had features closely corresponding to unsubstantiated historical descriptions of the king's deformed back and the manner of his death.

"It's just unbelievable," said Ibsen, a 55-year-old furniture maker from London, Ont., who now lives in his mother's native Britain.

"You couldn't have written a movie script better than this," he told Post-media News on Wednesday. "They find a skeleton with an arrow in its back, a spine with scoliosis and a head wound from a sword. They might as well have found him with a plaque saying HERE I AM."

The identification clincher, though, would be a DNA match with the Ibsen family, the members of which are known to have descended from the same maternal bloodline as Richard III. In 2005, British historian and genealogist John Ashdown-Hill announced he had traced Richard's lineage to Ibsen's mother, Joy, a retired journalist living in Canada.